30 Year Republican: What the Mainstream Media Isn't Telling You

Let me read you a paycheck. Amazon Warehouse Job,

Illinois, 40 hours a week at $22 an hour.

Seems like an amazing job, and it seems like the one that you might want

for your kids or for your nephew who is complaining about the economy,

complaining about the the person who's currently in the office of the president.

But

That's the real wage right now,

twenty two dollars an hour. That is a job that you could actually get in Illinois.

I checked the job listings. Forty hours.

So

that's eight hundred and eighty dollars before any money comes out of your paycheck,

in a week. So eight hundred and eighty bucks for a week sounds pretty decent.

Those numbers are built from the actual wage and the actual insurance costs that

employers report. So you can you can check them.

I'm I'm not making them up. I'm not

like averaging across 10 years of of old information.

This is what the number is right now.

Let me break down the deductions because this is the whole conversation right here.

Social Security taxes comes out of that.

$54.80, that's six point two percent of the gross.

Medicare comes out, that's twelve dollars and seventy six cents,

that's one point four five percent.

Federal income tax withholding,

depending on their filing status and whether they have dependents,

is roughly $100 per week. That

is already $167.56 gone before they have health insurance,

before they have anything else.

Then the health insurance. The company typically contributes part of it,

and the company calculates as part of your total compensation,

but the employee share still comes from the paycheck.

For basic coverage, not great coverage,

just basic coverage, the American average of $1,886 as a deductible,

not including the 20% coinsurance on anything that you need medical help with.

That's about $60 per week out of the employees' take home.

So out of $880 gross,

we've taken out $227 in taxes and health insurance.

That leaves about six hundred and fifty-two dollars and forty-four cents per week.

That's a person working forty hours per week taking home six hundred

and fifty-two dollars. We're gonna cut off the forty-four cents because let's

be honest, we all learned the old way of doing math,

and it's a lot easier to put numbers together when you cut out everything behind

the decimal. And what can 44 cents buy you anyway?

So that's $2,610 per month before rent.

Before food, before a car payment,

before anything. The national average rent for a one bedroom,

one bathroom apartment in August 2026

is about $1,663 per month,

$1663. Now if you remove the ten largest US cities,

which is what we've done, where rents are for similar units,

one bedroom, one bath or often exceeding thirty five hundred dollars,

they're what

The cities that you'd think of,

there are there are actually four of them in Texas,

New York City, Chicago, Phoenix,

Arizona, San Diego, San Francisco,

the big top ten most expensive cities in the entire country.

I removed that from the entire list.

The average rent for a one-bedroom,

one-bath apartment is $1,663.

So that typically brings the average down once you remove it to $1,400 $1,500,

depending on whether.

A median or mean average is used.

So let's say they find an apartment for 1600 bucks.

That's that's the number I have in my mind,

certainly when I was in college and when I was a younger person with a one-bedroom,

one bathroom apartment. Sixteen hundred bucks was about the going rate for rent now.

So that leaves a single person by themselves in a one-bedroom,

one bath apartment.

With $1,010 left for the entire month.

Back in 2025, just feeding yourself costs anywhere from $245

to $500 every month. And that was before the grocery index climbed another

2.7% in 2026. That's the CPI.

It keeps track of the most common things that we buy and gives them

a general price throughout the national average.

Again, they're using

Swapping between mean and median,

and they arrived to a 2.7% increase on CPI.

But those broad averages don't tell the whole story of what happens at the register.

They hide the actual math of a shopping trip.

In fact, if you like coffee, just a good cup of black coffee like I do,

coffee prices spiked by 33 to 35%.

And if you want to have a hamburger or

I don't know, a beef sausage in the morning with a little bit

of oatmeal or something. Ground beef went up twenty two percent year over year.

But there is good news there was one grocery staple that did drop thirty percent

eggs. Everything else has been consistently higher month to month

at the grocery store. That is what we're working with.

Keep that number. The entire conversation is about whether that person

can live on it.

And what makes that possible or impossible?

Now let me tell you who's talking because you should weigh it.

My name is Joshua. In most of my life,

I am the computer guy. I'm the one you call when your email stops working

or when your iPhone starts doing something it did not used to do

and you can't figure out what changed.

I come over, I fix it, I don't make you feel stupid about it.

I mention that because this is the same job.

Somebody hands you a machine and a story about how it works,

and sometimes the story's wrong and somebody has to sit down and go through

it with you without being a jerk about it.

Here's the other part. And it's the part that matters for weighing what

I'm about to say. I was a Republican for thirty years.

Not casually. I walked door to door for George W.

Bush two times. Once before I was old enough to vote.

I knocked on strangers' doors in the heat.

Living in Louisiana and made the case.

I believed it. If you and I had talked politics in two thousand four,

I would have argued with you from the other direction and I would have been good

at it. I left the party officially in twenty sixteen.

I'm not gonna perform pride or or shame about that,

it's just what happened. And I ended up well to the left of where I started,

which I also am not going to hide because you would find that out in about

a minute anyway, and

Then nothing else I said for the rest of this episode would you actually listen to?

I'm telling you all of this in the first minute instead of the last one,

because the whole point here is that you should not have to take anybody's word

for anything, including mine. Every number I just read and every number

I am about to read is public information.

I will tell you where each one comes from,

and you can go and check them.

If I have one wrong, I want to know.

You can send me an email. It's the overlap at FOF dot foundation.

No dot com at the very end. Just

the overlap at FOF.foundation.

I'm not here to convert you. I spent thirty years on the other side

of this and nobody ever converted me by winning an argument.

Not one time. I changed my mind slowly by myself over years and

After the facts stop fitting the story that I had.

That is the only way it has ever worked for anybody.

What I can actually do is hand you the definition of a phrase as the people

who hold the position actually use it,

instead of the version that circulates on your favorite mainstream media channel.

That's the whole job. So here is the phrase.

Democratic socialism means the workers

And the community have a say in who owns and who controls the things they depend

on to live a power plant, a water system,

a hospital, a utility, who owns it,

who runs it, and whether a fund in another state gets to buy the factory

in your town, strip it for parts,

lay off five hundred people, and disappear.

That is what the phrase means.

Not that the government seizes things,

not that you own nothing. A say,

a vote, a seat at the table when decisions that determine your life get made.

Let me be also very clear about what it does not mean,

because this is where the conversation got hijacked.

It does not mean communism. Communism says the state owns everything.

And you cannot vote that out ever.

Democratic Socialism says you vote,

and if you do not like it, you vote it out.

That is the entire difference.

Elections. That phrase is load bearing,

and it's the one that never survives the trip to television.

It does not mean the government takes your house or your truck or your gun.

It means the community decides who owns the water system and the power lines.

Shared infrastructure, not personal property.

Those are different categories,

and they get deliberately blurred.

It does not mean that nobody works.

The one I want to spend a minute on because it's exactly backwards from the history.

Eugene Debs was a railroad man.

Fireman on a locomotive at nineteen.

He helped build the American Railway Union.

In nineteen eighteen he gave a speech in Canton,

Ohio against the draft, and the federal government convicted him under

the Espionage Act and sent him to the Atlanta Penitentiary.

He was inmate number two hundred two five three,

and in nineteen twenty, from inside that cell he ran for president

of the United States of America and got nine hundred fourteen thousand votes.

Think about what that number means.

Almost one million Americans,

most of whom would never have called themselves radicals,

voted for a man in federal prison.

Not because they had read theory,

because they remembered the coal mines.

They remembered twelve hour shifts in the mills seven days a week.

They remembered men worked until they died and then replaced on Monday.

The demand those people were making was

Was not that nobody should work.

The slogan was eight hours for work,

eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.

They wanted a life on the other side of the shift.

And they won it in pieces over forty years.

The Adamson Act in nineteen sixteen gave railroad workers

the first federally mandated eight hour day.

The Fair Labor Standards Act in nineteen thirty eight.

Establish the forty hour work week and the minimum wage.

Your weekend came from that fight.

Overtime pay came from that fight.

If you have ever gotten time and a half,

you have collected on a debt that those people paid,

sometimes with their lives. That is not nobody working,

that is everybody working, and not having your entire life be your job.

And here's the part I want you to sit with because it's the one that got me.

There is a decade a lot of people on the right point back to as when this country

worked. One income could carry a house and a family.

A man could get hired at a plant at twenty and retire from it.

You could buy a home on a factory wage.

That was the middle of the nineteen fifties,

and in nineteen fifty four.

Union membership in the American workforce hit its all time peak right around

a third of every worker in the United States.

Those two facts are the same fact.

The era people are nostalgic for is the era with the highest union density

in American history, the strongest labor law,

and the top tax rates of this century.

That is not a coincidence but

And it is not a coincidence anybody wants to explain to you,

because the moment that you notice it,

a lot of what is on television stops making sense.

It does not mean that Venezuela or Cuba or the Soviet Union.

Those were disasters, dictatorships,

no real elections, and millions dead.

I am not going to soften that or walk around it,

and I understand completely.

Why those are the places that come to mind when you hear the phrase.

Those governments used the word and betrayed it by making sure no

one could vote them out. That is not democratic,

and that is not democratic socialism.

That is the opposite of it. And the thing that makes it the opposite

is the elections. I will say this very plainly because it cuts both directions.

Plenty of people who use the word socialism in the

In this country are insufferable.

You know the type, university types,

campus types who have never had a job,

who use the word as a costume,

and could not tell you what a shop steward does.

They exist. They are annoying.

They are also not who I am describing.

They are not who wrote any of the history that I just gave you.

But anybody who argues against socialism.

Using only Venezuela without ever mentioning Denmark or Norway

is picking examples that serve them.

If the claim is that it does not work,

then explain Denmark. Then explain Norway.

Explain why those countries have higher wages,

shorter work weeks, better health outcomes,

longer lives, and functioning economies with shining examples

of capitalism working within their system.

GLP ones, simaglutide, terzepitide are a perfect example of that.

An honest argument points at all of them.

Now here's the part that I think actually matters,

and this is not theoretical. It already exists here.

You already use it, you already like it.

Medicare. That's not capitalism.

You do not buy Medicare on an open market.

There is no Medicare store. No company competes to sell it to you.

You pay over your working life.

And then when you turn 65, it's there.

You do not have to hope your employer still offers coverage.

You do not have to fear losing it.

Who pays for it? Workers through taxes.

Who owns it? All of us. Who does it serve?

Everyone over sixty five. That is public ownership and democratic control.

The VA.

Veterans Affairs funded by taxes,

run by the government, serving people who served.

It has real problems and gets overstretched,

and in a number of measurable areas it still posts better patient outcomes than

private hospitals. Who pays? Taxpayers.

Who owns it? The public. The Interstate Highway System.

Eisenhower, a Republican general,

built it.

Paid for it with gas taxes, built by public works,

maintained by public agencies.

Every truck carrying goods across the country runs on it.

If a company owned the highways and charged by the mile,

commerce would be slower and more expensive.

Who owns it? The public. Who does it serve?

Everyone. The fire department,

funded by property taxes, staffed by public employees.

It shows up whether you can afford it or not.

Your house is on fire, they come.

Nobody asks about your insurance.

Nobody bills you for the water.

That is what a public service is.

A county road crew that salts the roads when there's ice or snow.

Crop insurance that carries farmers through a bad year.

Rural electric co ops which are owned by the members who use them.

And when they run a surplus, it's

It goes back to members as lower rates,

instead of out to a shareholder who has never been to the county.

The Tennessee Valley Authority brought power to seven states

in the nineteen thirties Tennessee,

Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi,

North Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia.

Before that, fewer than one in ten rural homes had electricity.

People were living like it was eighteen eighty,

no power, no refrigeration, no modern tools.

Your CPAP didn't work, and your

Diabetes medication could not be refrigerated.

Private companies had already looked at it and said no,

it's not profitable. That was communities deciding some things are

too important to leave to profit.

So we will own it, we will run it,

and we will decide together what happens to it.

Every one of those falls into the same category public

or community ownership democratic control.

No outside fund extracting value.

They have been working for fifty,

seventy, ninety years. Your family depends on several of them right now.

And nobody calls them socialism because nobody ever had an interest

in making you afraid of the word when it's attached to something you like.

So what democratic socialism asks for is not something different from Medicare.

Or the fire department. It's the same thing.

It's just applied more broadly.

It asks who owns the hospital?

Right now, a lot of them are owned by private equity,

and they're buying more every single month.

Let's give a specific example because this is real and recent,

and I want you to look up every single part of it.

Anchor Hawking Glass. Charleroi,

Pennsylvania in Washington County.

That plant had been running in that town for a hundred and thirty-two years.

Multiple generations of the same families worked there,

learned the trade from their fathers,

passed it to their kids. Around three hundred people had employed jobs there.

Decent wages for the area too,

plenty of benefits, an employee union,

stability in a town that does not have a lot of stability.

In February of twenty twenty four,

Center Lane Partners, a private equity firm,

Acquired that business. By the end of twenty twenty four,

the Charleroi plant was closing three hundred jobs.

The firm that bought it was not in the business of making glass.

They looked at the assets and the property and the inventory and came

to the conclusion that it was worth more shut down and moved than running.

The Pennsylvania Attorney General filed an antitrust complaint that October

to stop it.

And a federal judge ruled the closure could proceed.

The people in Charleroi did not get to vote in any of that.

The workers had no seat at the table.

They didn't ask the community.

132 years ended because a hedge fund in another state decided that

was the best use of the asset.

It's happening now all across the country with data centers.

And if that feels like something new,

like some modern private equity invention,

it is not. It happened on that same river,

and it's worth knowing how because it explains why nobody wanted a seat

at that table in the first place.

Homestead, Pennsylvania, twenty some miles up the I'm gonna mispronounce this,

but Monangahila from Charleroi.

July of eighteen ninety two, Carnegie Steel,

the most productive steelworks in the country,

and the men in it belonged to the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers,

which was then the strongest union in America.

Andrew Carnegie wanted the union out.

He also wanted to be in Scotland while it happened,

so he left it to his chairman,

Henry Clay Frick, and Frick.

Did it thoroughly. He built a fence around the print plant three miles long with

barbed wire on top, and holes cut in it at rifle height.

The men called it Fort Frick. He locked them out,

cut the wage, and hired three hundred Pinkerton agents.

On july sixth, he floated those Pinkertons up the river on barges in the dark,

armed, to take the plant. The town was waiting.

What happened next was not a labor dispute,

it was a gunfight on a riverbank that went most of the day and left men dead

on both sides. The Pinkertons surrendered,

and the workers won. They won for six days.

Then the governor sent eight thousand state militia,

and that was the end of it. The plant reopened without the Union,

and Union steel in that valley did not come back for forty years.

Now hold the

These two things next to each other Homestead in eighteen ninety

two and Charleroi in twenty twenty four.

Same river? Same question? Who decides what happens to the place where three hundred

people work? And do the three hundred people get a say in it?

In eighteen ninety two the answer arrived on a barge with rifles.

In twenty twenty four it arrived as a filing.

Nobody had to fire a shot in Charleroi,

because nobody there had any mechanism to say no.

That is the whole difference. And it's not the kind of progress it sounds like.

Democratic Socialism says no. It says when you own a plant in our town

and employ our people, the workers and the community get a voice in what happens

to it. Now, not necessarily a veto,

a voice.

A union contract with real teeth,

a mechanism where the people who eat the consequences have input into the decision.

It says the water system cannot be a cash extraction machine for a hedge fund.

It says a hospital cannot be a thing you buy,

squeeze for five years, and flip.

It says the power grid is a utility that has to work.

Not a stock to trade. And it says a working person who works forty hours

a week should be able to live.

The warehouse worker we started with at two thousand six hundred ten dollars

a month not survive, live, make rent,

have food, a vehicle that gets them to and from their job,

take a kid to the doctor without it being a financial event.

That is what the argument is actually about.

Now, the honest part, and I'm gonna be straight with you rather than sell

you something. It costs money.

Somebody has to pay for it. I'm not gonna pretend public systems are free

or that they don't require taxes because they do.

That is real, and anybody who tells you different is selling you something.

And government does run things badly sometimes.

I have sat at the DMV like everyone else.

Public programs have waste in them.

They have people being paid to move paper instead of solving the problem.

I understand exactly why that makes you nervous because it makes me nervous too.

And I'm not going to insult you by pretending that the concern is irrational.

It is not. But here's my actual answer to it.

The comparison being offered to you is the worst of governments.

Against a gleaming vision of private business that exists in theory.

In practice, private systems have enormous waste too.

They also have people moving paper instead of solving problems.

The difference is you do not see it.

Because it's buried in premiums and executive compensation and marketing budgets,

it comes out before the bill ever reaches you.

But that is still your money.

The question is not whether or not there will be waste,

there will be. The question is whether the waste is serving you

or extracting from you. So let me put real numbers on it.

An ambulance ride in this country ten minutes,

local transport, that runs you roughly a thousand dollars out of pocket.

One thousand dollars for ten minutes in a vehicle with lights on the roof.

Air transport, a medical emergency needing a helicopter.

The government accountability office looked at this.

You are talking tens of thousands of dollars,

and a large share of those flights are out of network,

which means your insurance covers part,

and you get billed for the rest.

People have gotten bills over twenty thousand dollars for a helicopter ride when

they were unconscious and did not choose it.

In Norway.

That ride does not generate a bill.

Neither does the ambulance. They pay for it in taxes,

and yes, their taxes are higher.

I'm not going to pretend that they're not,

but nobody in Norway gets a twenty thousand dollars bill for

a helicopter because that is not how they decided to build it.

And they decided it democratically.

Here is the big number. The United States spends fourteen thousand dollars.

seven hundred and eighty one dollars per person per year on healthcare.

That is everything. Your share,

your employer's share, the government's share.

Every year, whether you go to a doctor or not.

Denmark spends seven thousand seventy one dollars per person.

That is roughly half, not somewhat less,

half.

And the Danes work fewer hours,

take more vacation, live longer,

and have lower infant mortality.

Half the money, better outcomes.

That is not an opinion. That is spending data from countries doing it right now.

So the question is this: Do you want the water system owned

by a fund looking to maximize extraction?

Over five years before selling it to another hedge fund,

or owned by the community that drinks the water.

That is the actual vote.

I want to say one more thing and I'll get out of your way.

Some profit is fine. Investment requires return.

Building something requires a reason to build it.

I am not confused about that, and I'm not arguing against business existing.

What I am arguing again is that what happens when profit becomes

the only thing we care about.

When a pension gets looted by a fund manager two states away who has never

met a single worker and has no reason to care whether they can put food

on the table at seventy years old,

when a utility is run to pull value out now instead

of maintaining the lines for the next fifty years,

when a hospital gets treated like a playing card or a trading card,

that's not really capitalism anymore.

That is extraction. And you can tell the difference because extraction never builds

anything. We have done it the other way before,

in living memory, in this country.

The New Deal, rural electrification,

the forty hour work week, the VA,

Medicare, all of those things exist.

They are imperfect. But they work.

And they work because they were built on one idea.

Some things are too important to leave it to a profit motive.

So we own them together and we decide together.

Now back to our person, the warehouse associate in Illinois,

forty hours, two thousand six hundred and ten dollars a month.

Right now between premiums, copays,

deductibles, coinsurance, that household is losing several hundred dollars

a month to health coverage.

Before anyone actually gets sick.

Under a system built the way Denmark or Norway built theirs,

most of that becomes tax. At roughly half the total per person cost.

What is left over is not a rounding error to somebody at that income.

It's the dentist. It's a car that starts.

It's winter boots that are not held together with duct tape.

Will it take more taxes? Yes. The question is whether you would rather

pay through taxes into a system designed to serve you or through premiums

and deductibles and surprise bills from out of network anesthesiologists into

a system designed to extract money from you.

You're already paying for it. That's the part that gets left out.

You are already paying and paying more.

For less. You're gonna keep hearing this word,

this phrase, democratic socialism.

And it's going to get thrown at you on television and in arguments

and by people running for office.

But now you know what it actually means.

You know how it differs from communism.

And that the difference is elections.

You know why Venezuela is not the comparison and why Denmark is.

And you know you already use several pieces of it every week.

So when somebody uses the word at you,

you can tell whether they know what they're talking about.

If they tell you it means the government seizes your house,

they're either lying to you or they read it somewhere and never checked.

If they tell you it means that nobody works,

they do not know what a union is or what the labor

Bur movement actually won. If they bring up Venezuela and never once mention

Denmark, they're cherry picking their examples.

That is what I wanted to hand you.

Not a conclusion, just the actual definition of democratic socialism

and the receipts, so that next time it comes up you are arguing about

the real thing instead of a caricature you were sold.

You can disagree with all of it.

Plenty of people do, and some of them are rather good at arguing it.

But now you can disagree with what it is,

not something that it's not. That is worth something.

Thank you.